Question by Dirk von Pelvis: What was the big difference between Trotsky and Stalin? Both Communists, no?
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Answer by wizebloke
Yes, both Marxist-Leninists
After Lenin died, they were both trying to take over as chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR.
Differences:
Stalin wanted to consolidate the Communist power in USSR
Trotsky wanted the revolutions to be exported to other countries
Stalin eliminated many political rivals … that is how he kept power domestically.
Even during the WW II, he pulled the defence back behind the Urikrane, burning crops on the way through. He said it was to not leave any resources for the enemy … but it also meant the rebel nation of the Urikrane had thousands starve and freeze to death that winter.
To expand USSR after WW II, he kept troops just outside cities the Russians were liberating until the Germans destroyed all rebels (Warsaw was a horrendus example), then they moved in and transplanted Communism there.
Stalin also declared war on Japan a few days before they gave up … so when they surrendered, USSR could claim some of the territory Japan anixed (eg North Korea)
Trotsky was assasinated before his style of Communism could be disproven … so idealist use him as an example even though all other Marxist-Leninist regimes caused so much human suffering.
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Chatty82 says
Look it up in the encyclopedia. Trotsky was a street cat around Moscow before they ended rooming houses, "places people could get together and agitate against the Czar" and a lower strata of existence, and that is what Russians still do, especially in places there is going to be Olympic games. They do not consider a life in a dwelling without plumbing munching on bees a "lower strata" as long as nobody talks to anybody else about politics.
Stalin was in an entirely different time frame! Trotsky was the one that had the Russian Revolution and Stalin founded the city of Stalingrad, (now Volgograd) and purged the ranks of the Czar's militia. Stalin did not realize that his troops and enforcers did not have an education or know the meaning of the word "bourgeois", (the MVD troops usually don't know too many words) and they wiped out the farming population, confusing "bourgeois" with "peasant".
Marx and Lenin were the communists.